


retinal shadows

by Sciosa



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (more or less), (mostly less but don't tell him that), Gen, and it's barely lonelyeyes really, elias is jonah (kind of), just thinking about bastard men lately i guess!!!, this isn't even the main lonelyeyes thing i'm writing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2019-10-07
Packaged: 2020-11-26 16:30:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20933279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sciosa/pseuds/Sciosa
Summary: Elias Bouchard is no one special.(Elias Bouchard is not Elias Bouchard.)





	retinal shadows

The body is a traitor.

Elias learned this truth early, and it is why he's never grown overly attached to any of his.

The body flinches from the light and shivers in the cold. Its lungs struggle for breath and its limbs fight gravity. It needs constant maintenance and care, an unruly child without discipline or restraint. Its pathetic heart quails when its eyes witness the terror it belongs to, because all it knows is animal instinct.

There is nothing holy in the body.

* * *

Elias Bouchard is an unremarkable child-- he is, perhaps, a little more curious than other children, but not noticeably; a little more intuitive, but not especially. He writes detailed but dull reports about the frogs in his neighbor's pond, and tells his mother that the stars are just eyes, far away, watching him. She tells him that he's misunderstanding how light works, and he hums agreeably and doesn't argue. He has no venomous dreams, no grand designs.

If sometimes he knows things he shouldn't know, guesses names and ages with startling accuracy, well, they did say his great aunt Marta had a touch of what she just called Sight, and sometimes that sort of thing skips a generation or two. Nothing to get worked up over. Certainly nothing to mention in polite company.

He is an unremarkable teenager-- unwise, but not dangerous; factual, but not clever-- and an unremarkable adult. He has many shallow friendships, and books of lists that he memorizes absently, and a warm smoke that dulls the angled edges of distant stars that never completely looked away.

Elias Bouchard is no one special.

(Elias Bouchard is not Elias Bouchard.)

(But he is _now_.)

* * *

He opens his eyes-- the body’s eyes, new eyes-- and finds them, as usual, wanting.

He opens his Eyes.

Better.

* * *

There are a number of inconveniences attached to bodies, not least that they come with _extraneous attachments_, people who recognize his new face and attach what they imagine is meaning to it. It takes time to wear down those associations and build new ones in their place, to do it quickly and efficiently but without revealing his hand. People don’t go in for accusations of witchcraft and changelings so much these days, but it would be _nearly_ as inconvenient to be committed to a mental institution, and Elias simply does not have the patience for that sort of business anymore. He has things to be _getting on with_.

* * *

It isn’t the way he expected it to be, when he started. He had thought-- had imagined-- a sort of whole transfer of himself, as if you could scoop out what made a person and sew it neatly into a new suit. It isn’t that.

It’s more like being… pressed through a fine sieve. The essentials, the _valuable_ parts of himself, those are preserved and filtered into the new body. He becomes its color, its flavour, the vital essence that gives it purpose. The rest of him, he supposes, is discarded. Anything that isn’t worth _remembering_, bringing with him from one life to another.

It’s why _selection_ is important. The body doesn’t need to be anything in particular, but the mind inside it needs to meet certain _qualifications_. He needs something without much natural depth, something clear and simple and uncomplicated so that when he moves into it the rest of the identity bends around him instead of trying to fight him. And it’s best, of course, if the Eye is already involved. The transitions are so much more convenient that way.

Elias Bouchard pauses in front of a dusty book with an embossed eye on the cover, fills his lungs with gentle smoke, and glances down at a page.

And it is Elias Bouchard who exhales, grinds the glowing end of the blunt out on a loose brick, and tucks the book back into its hiding place within the walls.

It is even, mostly, the same Elias Bouchard.

From a certain point of view.

* * *

Some things, at least, are straightforward enough. Picking up old contacts, introducing them to the new body and teaching them the new name, at least comes without the burdens of transitioning between identities. He is expected.

“Ah,” says the latest of the Lukas patriarchs, “Elias, is it?”

“Yes,” he says, with a thin smile that does not yet _quite_ fit the face it is attached to.

“Fine,” says Lukas, “While you’re here-- Peter, come in.”

* * *

(The body is a lover.

Elias learned this truth recently, and now he is _trapped_.

The fog is rolling in from the sea.

There is worship in skin touching skin.)


End file.
